Molood Mazaheri

When everyday life passes through the artist’s personal experience and perception, it can become material for painting. What is brought into representation in this process is not everyday life itself, but the artist’s experience and apprehension of it: fragments of life that have passed through the mind and in which emotions, perceptions, and lived experiences have taken shape. This is also a central concern in the work of Moloud Mazaheri. In her paintings, she engages with her experiences as a woman and a mother, as well as with her everyday life—a mode of engagement that seems to offer a way of clarifying and refining her perceptions and feelings within these positions.

Mazaheri’s painting is structured around shifts in scale and emphasis. Rather than adhering to naturalistic proportions, she enlarges those parts of the body most frequently seen and touched in everyday life—the face, hands, and feet, and at times such features as the ear and mouth—rendering them larger than their conventional scale. The result is an image that presents the domestic environment from an intimate distance and with heightened intensity. Her drawing separates the figures from the background through distinct, emphatic lines, while faces and hands are rendered with a relatively realistic degree of precision; meanwhile, spaces and objects are reduced to flat, simplified planes. This combination of precision and simplicity places the familiar alongside the unfamiliar. The colours are saturated and highly contrasted: warm flesh tones set against cool, light-coloured backgrounds, while recurring patterns such as dots and stripes fill the space, lending the scenes a sense of liveliness and something approaching playfulness.

In this way, scenes from everyday life move beyond straightforward depiction and become an experience that is at once familiar, compressed, and slightly uncanny. This approach can be associated with a particular way of seeing that emerges from living alongside a child—a way of experiencing the world from a closer distance and from another level of perception. For Mazaheri, motherhood is not merely a subject of painting; it can also be understood as a way of knowing the world, a form of knowledge that emerges through caring for a child. It seems that through motherhood she has discovered a new way of seeing and encountering the world: a world that begins anew with the arrival of the child, and that the mother comes to know again alongside them.

This new way of seeing, however, is not always unified or uncomplicated. As her works suggest, it is at times accompanied by tension and anxiety—an anxiety that manifests itself in the enlarged scale of bodies and objects, as though everything, from hands and faces to the objects of the home, acquires an excessive weight under the watchful gaze of care. The painter looks at the world while re-encountering it through the experience of motherhood, and in depicting it, she both reveals and simultaneously examines this renewed way of understanding the world. Painting thus becomes both a scene of experience and a means of thinking the world anew.